Posted on 03/25/2022 1:55:01 PM PDT by Wuli
Can spiritual and political leaders step up and end the conflict with Armenia?
“One war doesn’t make you forget another war,” François-Xavier Bellamy, a French member of the European Parliament, said on March 10. While the world’s eyes are on Ukraine, the European Parliament still found time this month to condemn Azerbaijan’s war against Armenia’s sacred past. This solidarity is encouraging but insufficient.
On Feb. 3 the Azerbaijani government announced that it would target hundreds of sacred sites that bear witness to Armenian Christian history in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. “A working group of specialists,” pro-government media quoted culture minister Anar Karimov as saying, “has been set up to remove the fictitious traces written by Armenians.”
Fictitious traces? Armenian presence in the area goes back thousands of years and can be seen in innumerable monuments. Some churches have roots in the early fourth century, and no serious scholar disputes their authenticity. But Azerbaijan, a majority-Muslim country that conquered much of the region in a 2020 war, is deploying a government-promoted conspiracy theory that casts Armenian cultural monuments as fake. As the Cornell University-based Caucasus Heritage Watch shows in its satellite research, even Armenian cemeteries haven’t been safe from Azerbaijan’s wrath since 2020. Tombstones, new and old alike, are bulldozed in the name of construction.
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Between 1997 and 2006, Azerbaijan covertly flattened every trace of Armenian Christianity in historically disputed areas it controlled already. Azerbaijan now says that the thousands of destroyed monuments, including the prominent churches of Agulis and the celebrated necropolis of Djulfa, never existed. That Baku would extend this project to its new dominions is brazen but unsurprising.
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(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Israel, for strategic resions,oil and Iran, backed Azerbaijan mad mo regime in 2020. Now you’d think a nation that from an Arab perspective is seen as an minority enclave in the wider Arab region in general and J&S specifically vis a vis palis, would have been more sensitive to Armenian situation ie also a genocided people. What Azerbaijan is doing,the Arabs have done and are doing regarding Jewish connection with the Land of Israel in general and Judea and Samaria (when under Jordanian control and vontinuingb Pali propaganda). Judea and Samaria could be seen as Israel’s Nagorno Karabakh. And as Russia pressured Armenia to relinquish Nargorno in the interest of a wider peace settlement, so to have various U.S admins pressured and will pressure Israel to give up J&S for a wider peace and one day we may well be reading about Jordanian and Pali’s erasing all physical connections of Jews to J&S.
If I remember my history of that area, it was Armenian till Stalin gave it to Azerbaijan strictly to create tension between the two.
Ali & Nino
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